9 Feb 2024 16:00 CET - Plant virus discovery beyond crops: from wild plant reservoirs to underexplored environmental components

Denis Kutnjak,  National Institute of Biology, Department of Biotechnology and Systems Biology, Ljubljana, Slovenia

Viruses likely represent the most diverse part of biosphere; nevertheless, large part of their diversity is still unknown. Viromics approaches, based on high-throughput sequencing, enable the studies of virus diversity inside and outside of their hosts, in different environments, where some viruses can persist for long periods of time. In past few years, we have addressed the diversity of viruses in crop and wild plants, invertebrates and different water types. We discovered several previously unknown viruses, mostly in wild plants and in surface water samples. Using viromics, we have also discovered diverse set of nucleic acids of viruses infecting plants in wastewater, and demonstrated their infectivity even after wastewater treatment, using classical virology approaches. In this talk, different cases of research from the fields of virus discovery, environmental virology, virus ecology and wastewater epidemiology will be presented.